the weekly musings of an over-educated young woman on writing, reading, and other miscellany

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Feedback: It Gets Easier

This is a post I couldn’t write a few years ago. Back then,
I had just started sharing my work with others. Although I desperately needed
feedback, sometimes it hurt. Sometimes the criticisms made me doubt. And
sometimes those criticisms made me change my stories, for better and
worse.

But it doesn’t change the fact that feedback is a necessary
evil in writing.

That first project? You know the one. The story that started
them all, the one you’ll see through the bitter end, and the one you fear will
end up in the bottom of the desk drawer. That one—your baby.

Feedback on that story is always the hardest. There’s
no way around that, unless you have a Teflon-coated ego (and if you have one of
those maybe you shouldn’t writing). You put so much of yourself into that
first book, your dreams and hopes that you’ll buck the trend and get on the NY
Times bestseller list. Any critical feedback will seem like an indictment against all
that labor and love.

But if you’re writing for publication, you’ll get over that
eventually. You’ll have to. Along with revising and revising some more until
it’s time to start the feedback cycle all over again. It’ll go easier the
second time around. After all, you already understand how it works. You have a
stronger sense of your story’s strengths and weaknesses, and perhaps more
importantly, you’ll understand yourself better. Which means knowing when you
are overreacting to a piece of criticism and knowing which suggestions you need
to consider and which ones you need to ignore. This is a huge milestone, but it
takes practice with the feedback cycle, and sometimes a strong understanding of
the people reading your work.

It takes time to do this. But it’s time well spent, because
you need to get all this out of your system in order to start on the next
project, regardless of whether your baby sells.

With the next project, you’ve told
yourself you’re not going to make the same mistakes as the first. And you
won’t—you’ll just make different ones. And then the feedback circuit will give
you time to fix them.

It’ll be even easier this time. You know why? Because you
don’t have nearly the same emotional investment in this project as you did in
the one before. I’m not saying you don’t care about this project—you most
certainly do. But now you know that this project isn’t the be-all and end-all
of your writing career. You have other stories in you. This new story proves
it.

So feedback this time may still sting, but you’ll be better
able to compartmentalize it and use it to fuel positive changes in your work.
And this is hugely valuable when you’re faced with tough revision decisions
like restructuring your novel, adding or subtracting characters, or simply
gutting the story and starting all over again.

The hard work that maybe you weren’t strong enough to even
consider with your baby. But now, when the hunger for getting published—getting
out there—when you have enough confidence in your craft that it’s just a matter
of the right story hitting at the right time? Yeah, that. That’s when the tough
decisions get made.

(and if this sounds like a pep talk, it kinda is for me)

The takeaway is this:

The more you write, the more mistakes you get to learn from.

The more mistakes you learn from, the more viable stories
you create.

The more viable stories, the easier it is to deal with
feedback.

Why? Because you can be more objective about your work.
Because you no longer have the one story to care about, you have other projects
now. All that emotion, good and bad, gets distributed across them. The
successes and failures of individual projects gets muted, which makes it easier
to make objective decisions how to manage them.

It’s a good thing, I think. It’s just important stay engaged,
move forward, and above all, keep writing.

In my experience, my objectivity is reduced the longer I
spend working on something. Tunnel vision is inevitable—that’s why it’s so
important to take a break from your projects every now and then to gain
perspective. It’s also why you need other readers.

But at the very least, if you keep writing, the less likely
you’ll fall into the trap you did when writing your baby.

*Time spent working on a project could be equated to length
of project as well. For example, negative criticism on my shorter pieces doesn’t
nearly affect me as much as for my novel-length stories. But your mileage may
vary.

3 comments:

Good points here. I think feedback gets easier also because you start to learn what to expect and you undertand that a reader's comments do not mean they hate your writing. :) The toughest critiques I receive are from those that love my work most.

You also had an excellent point about knowing your readers. In feedback, so much is subjective, and knowing where a reader is coming from personally can shed a lot of light on their comments.

Absolutely fabulous post! Seriously. Learning to be objective about your work is probably the most critical part of the process, because it lets filter the feedback and apply it judiciously. But ultimately, it's also about knowing enough to be able to interpret the feedback. It's all part of the process, right? :)